BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said it is time that journalism return to its “core” purpose and become about “getting to the truth.”
In a first-person column published Thursday, Smith cheered the downfall of what he called “insider political journalism” and said news reporting now needs to focus on “movement politics.”
“A Brazilian editor once told me that you could tell his country was in political crisis because everyone was talking about politics all the time,” he wrote. “In a normal country, nobody cares about politics. And I think that most of all, the political journalism of that crisis is no longer a special genre of journalism, but instead the core of the profession: getting to the truth, explaining the world, and often telling stories with a clear right and wrong.”
Prominent news outlets have spent much of the last three years debating whether their approach to covering politics should change, particularly in regards to President Trump, who aggressively attempts to discredit coverage about him that he finds unfair or “fake.”
Despite his calls for a more assertive journalism that focuses on “truth,” Smith had to defend his controversial decision in January last year for BuzzFeed to publish the full Trump-Russia dossier, which contained salacious and still-unsubstantiated claims about the president’s personal and financial life.
Smith argued in an op-ed for the New York Times that it was sometimes necessary to publish “unverified information in a transparent way that informs our users of its provenance, its impact and why we trust or distrust it.”
